Stunned by Tragedy, a Village in Rural Quebec Turns Inward

L’ISLE-VERTE, Quebec — In the wintry days since a fire swept through the retirement home in this quaint, rambling village along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, L’Isle-Verte has been overrun by police officers, firefighters, coroners and anthropologists, painstakingly chipping away at the layers of ice encasing the building and digging through the charred ruins.

When they finish, the death toll of the Jan. 23 fire at the home, Résidence du Havre, is expected to reach 32.

Nearly everyone in this town of 1,425 people has been affected in some way: the families of those who died; the police officers who arrived in the early morning hours and crawled down hallways to avoid smoke, dragging elderly residents out on their backs; the firefighters who doused the blaze with water, the spray instantly freezing in the minus-8-degree cold, entombing the bodies in more than two feet of ice.

For the province of Quebec, the tragedy evoked a particularly horrible sense of déjà vu. It came nearly seven months after a runaway oil train exploded into a fireball in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people in a town of 6,000 some 245 miles away.

The inferno tore through a popular bar on a Friday night, stealing much of Lac-Mégantic’s youth. In L’Isle-Verte, the fire took the town’s grandparents and great-grandparents. Its victims range in age from Marie-Lauréat Dubé, 82, to a resident whose body has yet to be found, age 99. Any hope that the missing will be found alive has long since passed.

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Charred bed frames and twisted walkers.CreditIan Willms for The New York Times

Many of the police officers and recovery workers still battling the ferocious wind and biting cold to find traces of the victims in L’Isle-Verte performed the same role in Lac-Mégantic’s summer heat.

“Lac-Mégantic was my very first case like that, and I thought that it would be the last,” said Lt. Michel Brunet, chief communications officer who has served with the Sûreté du Quebec police for 37 years. “Now, seven months later, I’m here again.”

Before the fire, L’Isle-Verte was known mainly as a place tourists drive past on their way to the Gaspé Peninsula. Some stop for whale watching. Wide, deep and tidal, the St. Lawrence is more ocean than river at this point.

But like many of the towns and villages along its shoreline in the Bas St. Laurent region, northeast of Quebec City, L’Isle-Verte is richer in history and natural beauty than economic opportunity. Aside from tourism, a largely summer phenomenon, the region depends heavily on farming, forestry and arcane trades including eel fishing. More than a decade of depopulation has left the area with a median age of 48 compared with 42 for the province.

Cold, wind and distance — L’Isle-Verte is 120 miles from Quebec City — tend to keep outsiders away.

The wind now frustrating the recovery effort also gave the Résidence du Havre fire its unusually deadly and swift intensity. Soon after the fire started, about 12:30 a.m., the three-story frame building was ablaze. Neighbors told reporters they heard cries for rescue from residents trapped by flames. Some victims, police and coroners believe, jumped to their deaths.

Little remains of the portion of the home that was engulfed by the fire. Inside the recovery zone, the skeleton of its entrance is still recognizable, but it leads to a charred pit mixed in with the remains of tiled floors. A blackened walker, charred medical notes and the steel frames of chairs and beds testify to the life that existed here.

The villagers, unaccustomed to being the focus of attention and never partial to sharing with outsiders, have largely kept their grief to themselves.

At a news conference for local reporters in the back of a motel banquet room on Monday, Mayor Ursule Thériault was blunt. “L’Isle-Verte would be better without journalists,” she said. Another municipal official urged residents not to answer their doors for journalists or, better still, to leave town until the last of the television network satellite trucks have driven away.

The brushoff is generally polite but firm. When two outsiders walked into the village’s four-lane bowling alley, where about a dozen bowlers were playing, the manager spoke first.

No photos, no interviews, he said. “This is a place for people to relax and forget,” he said. On the wall next to ads for tractor dealers and plumbers was a prominent poster for Résidence du Havre.

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Workers dug through the icy rubble of the razed retirement home.CreditIan Willms for The New York Times

The stunned reticence here contrasted sharply with angry volubility in Lac-Mégantic. There the cause was clear: a speeding train on a rundown railway, whose unrepentant owner provided a target for blame that residents were eager to share with the world.

The situation in L’Isle-Verte is murkier. The police are investigating several possible causes but have no clear case for any of them.

Not long after the fire, news outlets reported that a cigarette smoked indoors by a 96-year-old resident had started the blaze. The police later called that report premature and inaccurate, but some residents were outraged by the insinuation that one of the fire’s victims was its cause. Since then, hardly anyone has spoken to the news media.

Despite the exceptional tragedy, there has been little criticism of the home’s owners. The burned-out portion of the 1997 building did not have sprinklers, which are not required under Quebec law. In a stark illustration of their value, an addition to the home built in 2002, equipped with sprinklers, remains standing, its occupants alive.

Before they stopped speaking publicly, many villagers praised the home’s operation and said they were grateful that it allowed them to keep elderly family members nearby.

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Lt. Michel Brunet, with Quebec’s provincial police, said of the stricken town’s residents: “They’re very close to each other. They have real solidarity.”CreditIan Willms for The New York Times

Last Sunday, the home’s co-owner, Roch Bernier, offered a tribute to the dead in the village’s large, silver-steepled church. He was roundly applauded.

Lieutenant Brunet, who was stationed in Bas St. Laurent for three years early in his career, said the locals had always kept to themselves, reluctant even to speak with police officers looking into crimes where they were victims. The villagers’ recovery from this disaster, he said, will come from within themselves.

“They’re very close to each other,” he said. “They have real solidarity.”

On Saturday, hundreds of mourners and dignitaries gathered in a Roman Catholic church for a nationally televised memorial mass. Framed photographs of the victims hung on a white pegboard. Relatives placed mementos — a shawl, a hat — on an empty white rocker.

“We all have, or have had, parents, grandparents who become elderly and are terribly vulnerable,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said afterward, outside the church. “And when we see something like this, I think it just breaks the heart of everybody.”

The recovery efforts have been delicate and slow. As was the case in Lac-Mégantic, they have been led by Lt. Jean-François Brochu.

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Mayor Ursule Thériault, center, with residents.CreditIan Willms for The New York Times

“The biggest difference here is 70 degrees,” he said just a few feet from a team using small hatchets to chip ice from the ruins. “There, in Mégantic, it was 35 Celsius; here with the wind it’s minus 35.”

In Fahrenheit, that was a difference of 126 degrees: 95 in Mégantic and minus 31 here.

To protect themselves from the cold, the recovery team has erected an incongruously festive-looking red-and-white striped tent over the ruins. A white plastic wall surrounds the site to thwart journalists and gawkers.

Inside, generators and machinery whir and pound like a small factory, the only sounds that overpower the howl of the wind. A machine normally used to melt ice off ships sends columns of steam pouring over the plastic wall.

An anthropologist from Toronto, wearing blue coveralls and kneepads, had helped identify remains at the World Trade Center as well as at Lac-Mégantic.

For Lieutenant Brochu, who was also sent to Haiti after the earthquake there in 2010, L’Isle-Verte will be his last disaster investigation. “When this is over,” he said, “I’m retiring.”

They keep going, said Andrée Kronstrom, the coroner at both disasters, for the families, who are looking for the certainty of the remains of their loved ones.

“One man told me: ‘Each morning I go near the place because my mother is still there,’ ” she said.

Correction:

A picture caption last Sunday with an article about a nursing home fire that left a Quebec village stunned and grief-stricken referred incorrectly to the police force that employs Lt. Michel Brunet. It is the Quebec provincial police; there is no Quebec “national” police force.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Stunned by Tragedy, a Village in Rural Quebec Turns Inward. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe